Could/. stop ending summaries with "Could this be the end of <something most/. readers think is bad>?"?
The parent post talks about summaries with endings that he doesn't like. Could this be the end of/. ending summaries with "Could this be the end of..."?
I remember being so frustrated with Battletoads, which is why having two players was great -- you could just take your frustration out with a giant foot or fist to the other player! Most of my games were played with my cousins and we usually ended up just beating the crap out of each other!
Instead of unfairly penalizing those of us who can listen to music while crossing the street (and, heaven forbid, chewing gum at the same time), why don't you just make it illegal to get hit by a vehicle while crossing the street and using an electronic gadget?
I was replying to my own post and correcting myself where I had used 'ie' instead of 'eg'.
I wasn't commenting on periods or italicizing...you were correct in your first post -- you used "ie" which is correct. Your second post to change it to "eg" was incorrect. That's all I was trying to point out.
A fairer question might be "For how many extinct species is mankind responsible?"
Well the Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi regime were responsible for the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, or at least that's what I overheard in the White House the other day, so there's a lot right there.
are only two ways of "saving" (ie, preserving) the Earth.
s/ie/eg/g
Actually i.e. is the correct usage. He was clarifying his use of "saving" to be more precisely "preserving." He was not giving an example (the meaning of e.g.) of "saving," at least not from the interpretation I took.
Anyway, this discussion is moot because FB has since changed their policies according to another thread. I guess they realized it was a dumb model, too.
Looks like we both discovered this around the same time. I think they realized, as you have been arguing, that the model is no longer as reliable as it used to be when the number of people who purchased flyers was very low. I also believe this is because Facebook sometimes displays national or regional ads in the Flyer position now, and I would argue that the 2,500 views for $5 is less than what you were getting on average before they changed their policy.
And all of this is moot because a Facebook flyer now is $5 for 2,500 views except in cases where the school is too small to reliably give you 2,500 views.
My comments are in the context of the original article, which is not talking about students. Anyway, just because most students might decide not to do such analysis, again, doesn't make the model any more sensible. Intelligent businesspeople who are interested in an actual advertising campaign would want to do such analysis, and it's not possible with Facebook's model.
I will agree with you -- Facebook's flyers is not a good example in the context of the original article for precisely the reasons we have discussed. However, there are a variety of other advertising options available to the "intelligent businesspeople" who are interested in advertising on Facebook, and many of them are very complex and customized solutions. For example, Apple has a sponsored group that gave out free iTunes music every week. If you just want a traditional banner ad then you have to go through Microsoft as they are now the exclusive provider of your traditional banner ads on Facebook.
Who says I am a member of Facebook? I just want to advertise there. Can I even become a member of Facebook?
IIRC, you must be a member of a network if you want to purchase a flyer for that network. Knowing several members of the Facebook team including Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's goal in offering flyers was to offer a cheap way for students and student groups to advertise events and services that they offer.
Obviously the scope and focus of Facebook has expanded considerably since it was founded, but Mark continues to insist that he sees Facebook as a way to connect communities, which is why they still offer the flyers. They could probably make more money by selling the space to larger companies, but to do so would be to move away from their stated goal.
To head off those who criticize Facebook for no longer being the exclusive college-only site it used to be, Facebook's intentions were never to be exclusive. Its purpose was and still is to connect people within a network -- they have just expanded their possible networks from colleges to now include high schools, companies, and now regions.
I really don't know how you could possibly make a generalization like that. Are you familiar with what goes into an analysis on where to spend advertising dollars? You seem to making the argument that it is such a "duh" decision that no one needs to do any actual analysis on it.
Because the students/groups that purchase these flyers are doing exactly that. Do you think these groups have advertising wings that go into intense details on the dollars that are spent on their advertising budget? Even at Harvard, I'd tend to think that the discussion is more like "Hey let's buy a flyer for $10 on Facebook. Unless someone wants to run to Kinkos, print out 100 flyers, and then go across campus at 5AM Tuesday morning when it's 10 below to ensure they get a spot on all the bulletin boards." You are taking a far too sophisticated look at the flyers. If I'm spending $10 on an advertisement I'm not going to worry too much about it. If I'm going to spend $2.5 million on a 30-second ad during the Super Bowl, then I think I'd do a little more research.
As far as I can tell, Facebook does not make this data available. So, again, you're just guessing.
This data is available, it just isn't presented very well. At any time you can view a list of all active flyers for your network, so if you do it over the course of a week or two you can get a pretty accurate idea of the average number of flyers active at a particular time. You also would likely have an idea of when peak times are (right before finals, spring break, after midterms, etc.) and could make reasonable assumptions around that as well. As far as the number of viewers, in nearly every article about Facebook they boast about their numbers -- around 85% of active students are members, 60% log in at least daily, and average around 10-20 page views per visit (Wikipedia has these numbers). You probably know approximately how many students there are in your school, so determining these numbers is not very difficult.
Of course if you are paying X amount of money for an ad, and that ad generates a verifiable Y amount of sales, and Y is less than X, then ditch the ad. Duh. How about telling us how not to get into that situation in the first place, as the article is trying to do?
This was exactly my point. The article was talking about how to determine the value of a particular advertisement before you made it or the overall value of a company. However, your original comment included:
Now, how do you measure profits made from advertising, because as I understand it, that is the issue under discussion here.
I was merely responding to that question which as I can see now you agree is a trivial question. The real question is, "How can you reliably predict profits from a potential advertisement?"
Let's say I have a bag of candy and I offer you an equal share in the bag for 15 cents. You don't know how many pieces are in the bag, and you don't know how many ways I'm going to split it up. How can you possibly decide whether it is worth it?
Because you have trends to look at in the past. If your candy situation is similar to Facebook flyers, then you could say with confidence that the bag averages 100 pieces, 10 people on average share the bag, and a piece of candy is worth 3 cents to you. In that case, the deal would be worth it because your expected value is 30 cents and the price of the opportunity is 15 cents. It is possible that you may have bad luck and that is the day there is only 20 pieces and 40 people to share the bag, but my guess is that the standard deviations of the number of pieces and number of people sharing would allow you to say with a very high (>95%) certainty that you will come out ahead.
Perhaps I was missing your point. If your point is that you don't know how many impressions you will get for a particular amount of money, then yes, you're absolutely correct. It could be that Day 1 you pay $10 and get 1,000 impressions, and Day 2 you pay $10 and get 3,000. However, the point you seem to be making is that you're not sure if you're going to get a good deal (which is reinforced by your candy bag example), and my counter-point to you is that even if you assume worst-case (yet still plausible) scenarios for Facebook flyers, you are still getting a good deal. If there are no other flyers on a particular day and it is a particularly high-trafficked day, then you are getting an even better deal, but even if you are sharing your flyer with 100 other flyers the price is so low to begin with that you're still getting a good deal.
You're missing the point. It still happens to work because not many advertisers use it per day. The fact that it still works is not a result of the system, which still makes no sense; it's the result of underutilized capacity.
But that is exactly the point. It works because of the boundaries set by the system's current use. Let's assume that a particular network gets 3,000 unique visitors per day and the median number of hits per visitor is 10. This would be fairly accurate numbers for a network of around 5,000 people, which would be relatively small for Facebook. Since I'm at work I don't have access to the current costs for a flyer, but let's say it costs $10. Even if there are 100 flyers up at a given time (which is an order of magnitude higher than a reasonable estimate), you would still reach about 300 people. Compare that to the cost of printing flyers and posting them around campus (plus the time involved in doing so, especially when it's 10 below at 5AM), and you'll see that Facebook flyers are really a good deal.
Now you can argue that you aren't necessarily guaranteed a certain amount of impressions, and while that is technically true, practically you can be assured of a minimum number of impressions which will undoubtedly be very cost effective.
To fit your example of a bag of candy more accurately to the situation, let's put the following stipulations:
1. You have a 99% chance of sharing the bag with no more than 10 people.
2. You have a 99% chance of the bag having at least 100 pieces of candy.
3. The price of sharing the bag is around the equivalent of 5 pieces of candy.
Wouldn't you take up that offer? There is no such thing as a certainty in the advertising world. Are Super Bowl adveertisers guaranteed an exact number of viewers (and that these viewers will be actively watching the advertisements and not getting another beer or going to the bathroom)? Absolutely not. But they have very good estimates that they base their decisions on, which is exactly what those who purchase the Facebook flyers are doing as well.
If you are only looking at actual sales, then click fraud is not an issue. This of course won't work if you aren't selling anything or if your income isn't predominantly from selling goods or services (for example, if you advertise your site and your site's source of income is also advertisements), which unfortuantely would describe a large portion of advertisers today.
I just don't understand how these kinds of things can be profitable
It can be quite unbelievable, and it applies to more than just online advertisements. It's hard to believe that a $2.5 million advertisement during the Super Bowl is profitable, but I trust that the companies that buy these spots have done their research and it is actually profitable. Overall Anheuser-Busch spent $850 million on advertisements in 2005. While not all of that is advertising beer (they have a few amusement parks for example), let's say that half of it was on beer and they make a profit of 50 cents per bottle/can or equivalent. That means their advertisements would have to increase sales by 850 million bottles of beer in order to make a profit. This is of course greatly simplified, but it is a good exercise to show how susceptible the population is to advertisements.
I just don't understand how these kinds of things can be profitable, given that I've never met anyone dumb enough to fall for them. I certainly have almost NEVER... (Emphasis mine)
This is EXACTLY how they are profitable. Multiply almost never by a ton of ad views and you've got yourself a profitable business. The exact same thing is true for spam advertisements -- except that it's a lot closer to never but it also gets many orders of magnitude more "hits" than a traditional website. The biggest goal in advertising today is to make sure that the advertisements are relevant to the people who view the advertisements, which is why Google especially has done well in the advertising marketplace. Additionally, many advertising agreements today only exchange money when a click-through (or even a sale) has occurred, as opposed to the older practice of charging per impression.
When I was in my teens a friend and I started up a game review website. While it only lasted a few months before it became too much to handle (and we also had gotten a little bored of it), we were getting between a 0.5 and 2% click-through rate depending upon our ad supplier.
Facebook is a poor example, because their advertising model makes no sense to begin with. You pay a fixed price for rotation on a particular day, but you have absolutely no idea whether that will be 1 impression or 1 million impressions.
This form of advertising on Facebook (flyers) is just one of the many ways to advertise on the site, and the vast majority of these ads are placed by students, student groups, or local businesses. For my networks there are rarely more than 6-7 of these ads up at any given time, so most visitors to the site (who will likely look at 10-20 pages per visit) will see all of the flyers available at a particular time.
It's the other advertisements (sponsored groups, banners at the bottom of the pages, etc.) where Facebook really brings in the dough, and also where the Microsoft ad deal took place.
I know several groups who have put up flyers on Facebook and for their purposes it was by far the most cost efficient solution to advertising, even when they were in a rotation with many other flyers. The other point I should make about the flyers is that they are often for events, so word of mouth will often spread the information to the people who might have missed that particular flyer. If I see a flyer for free ice cream at a particular event, I'll likely let my friends know about it as well.
When you see non-local advertisements in the flyer box it usually is the result of a separate deal directly with Facebook that is not subject to the flyer agreement.
Slashdot Mirror
I won't believe it until Netcraft confirms it!
That's because you forgot to say "enhance." If you say "enhance" you can continue to zoom in!
The parent post talks about summaries with endings that he doesn't like. Could this be the end of /. ending summaries with "Could this be the end of..."?
That's basically what I was getting at, perhaps my sarcasm was too subtle.
I remember being so frustrated with Battletoads, which is why having two players was great -- you could just take your frustration out with a giant foot or fist to the other player! Most of my games were played with my cousins and we usually ended up just beating the crap out of each other!
Instead of unfairly penalizing those of us who can listen to music while crossing the street (and, heaven forbid, chewing gum at the same time), why don't you just make it illegal to get hit by a vehicle while crossing the street and using an electronic gadget?
I wasn't commenting on periods or italicizing...you were correct in your first post -- you used "ie" which is correct. Your second post to change it to "eg" was incorrect. That's all I was trying to point out.
Well the Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi regime were responsible for the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, or at least that's what I overheard in the White House the other day, so there's a lot right there.
"10 years: Methane in atmosphere gone"
Did we take the cows with us? Or are they just less gassy without us around?
Because the Bush administration doesn't believe we would use it for peaceful purposes.
s/ie/eg/g
Actually i.e. is the correct usage. He was clarifying his use of "saving" to be more precisely "preserving." He was not giving an example (the meaning of e.g.) of "saving," at least not from the interpretation I took.
For more details check out Wikipedia
Looks like we both discovered this around the same time. I think they realized, as you have been arguing, that the model is no longer as reliable as it used to be when the number of people who purchased flyers was very low. I also believe this is because Facebook sometimes displays national or regional ads in the Flyer position now, and I would argue that the 2,500 views for $5 is less than what you were getting on average before they changed their policy.
And all of this is moot because a Facebook flyer now is $5 for 2,500 views except in cases where the school is too small to reliably give you 2,500 views.
I will agree with you -- Facebook's flyers is not a good example in the context of the original article for precisely the reasons we have discussed. However, there are a variety of other advertising options available to the "intelligent businesspeople" who are interested in advertising on Facebook, and many of them are very complex and customized solutions. For example, Apple has a sponsored group that gave out free iTunes music every week. If you just want a traditional banner ad then you have to go through Microsoft as they are now the exclusive provider of your traditional banner ads on Facebook.
IIRC, you must be a member of a network if you want to purchase a flyer for that network. Knowing several members of the Facebook team including Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's goal in offering flyers was to offer a cheap way for students and student groups to advertise events and services that they offer.
Obviously the scope and focus of Facebook has expanded considerably since it was founded, but Mark continues to insist that he sees Facebook as a way to connect communities, which is why they still offer the flyers. They could probably make more money by selling the space to larger companies, but to do so would be to move away from their stated goal.
To head off those who criticize Facebook for no longer being the exclusive college-only site it used to be, Facebook's intentions were never to be exclusive. Its purpose was and still is to connect people within a network -- they have just expanded their possible networks from colleges to now include high schools, companies, and now regions.
Because the students/groups that purchase these flyers are doing exactly that. Do you think these groups have advertising wings that go into intense details on the dollars that are spent on their advertising budget? Even at Harvard, I'd tend to think that the discussion is more like "Hey let's buy a flyer for $10 on Facebook. Unless someone wants to run to Kinkos, print out 100 flyers, and then go across campus at 5AM Tuesday morning when it's 10 below to ensure they get a spot on all the bulletin boards." You are taking a far too sophisticated look at the flyers. If I'm spending $10 on an advertisement I'm not going to worry too much about it. If I'm going to spend $2.5 million on a 30-second ad during the Super Bowl, then I think I'd do a little more research.
This data is available, it just isn't presented very well. At any time you can view a list of all active flyers for your network, so if you do it over the course of a week or two you can get a pretty accurate idea of the average number of flyers active at a particular time. You also would likely have an idea of when peak times are (right before finals, spring break, after midterms, etc.) and could make reasonable assumptions around that as well. As far as the number of viewers, in nearly every article about Facebook they boast about their numbers -- around 85% of active students are members, 60% log in at least daily, and average around 10-20 page views per visit (Wikipedia has these numbers). You probably know approximately how many students there are in your school, so determining these numbers is not very difficult.
This was exactly my point. The article was talking about how to determine the value of a particular advertisement before you made it or the overall value of a company. However, your original comment included:
Now, how do you measure profits made from advertising, because as I understand it, that is the issue under discussion here.
I was merely responding to that question which as I can see now you agree is a trivial question. The real question is, "How can you reliably predict profits from a potential advertisement?"
Because you have trends to look at in the past. If your candy situation is similar to Facebook flyers, then you could say with confidence that the bag averages 100 pieces, 10 people on average share the bag, and a piece of candy is worth 3 cents to you. In that case, the deal would be worth it because your expected value is 30 cents and the price of the opportunity is 15 cents. It is possible that you may have bad luck and that is the day there is only 20 pieces and 40 people to share the bag, but my guess is that the standard deviations of the number of pieces and number of people sharing would allow you to say with a very high (>95%) certainty that you will come out ahead.
Perhaps I was missing your point. If your point is that you don't know how many impressions you will get for a particular amount of money, then yes, you're absolutely correct. It could be that Day 1 you pay $10 and get 1,000 impressions, and Day 2 you pay $10 and get 3,000. However, the point you seem to be making is that you're not sure if you're going to get a good deal (which is reinforced by your candy bag example), and my counter-point to you is that even if you assume worst-case (yet still plausible) scenarios for Facebook flyers, you are still getting a good deal. If there are no other flyers on a particular day and it is a particularly high-trafficked day, then you are getting an even better deal, but even if you are sharing your flyer with 100 other flyers the price is so low to begin with that you're still getting a good deal.
But that is exactly the point. It works because of the boundaries set by the system's current use. Let's assume that a particular network gets 3,000 unique visitors per day and the median number of hits per visitor is 10. This would be fairly accurate numbers for a network of around 5,000 people, which would be relatively small for Facebook. Since I'm at work I don't have access to the current costs for a flyer, but let's say it costs $10. Even if there are 100 flyers up at a given time (which is an order of magnitude higher than a reasonable estimate), you would still reach about 300 people. Compare that to the cost of printing flyers and posting them around campus (plus the time involved in doing so, especially when it's 10 below at 5AM), and you'll see that Facebook flyers are really a good deal.
Now you can argue that you aren't necessarily guaranteed a certain amount of impressions, and while that is technically true, practically you can be assured of a minimum number of impressions which will undoubtedly be very cost effective.
To fit your example of a bag of candy more accurately to the situation, let's put the following stipulations:
1. You have a 99% chance of sharing the bag with no more than 10 people.
2. You have a 99% chance of the bag having at least 100 pieces of candy.
3. The price of sharing the bag is around the equivalent of 5 pieces of candy.
Wouldn't you take up that offer? There is no such thing as a certainty in the advertising world. Are Super Bowl adveertisers guaranteed an exact number of viewers (and that these viewers will be actively watching the advertisements and not getting another beer or going to the bathroom)? Absolutely not. But they have very good estimates that they base their decisions on, which is exactly what those who purchase the Facebook flyers are doing as well.
If you are only looking at actual sales, then click fraud is not an issue. This of course won't work if you aren't selling anything or if your income isn't predominantly from selling goods or services (for example, if you advertise your site and your site's source of income is also advertisements), which unfortuantely would describe a large portion of advertisers today.
It can be quite unbelievable, and it applies to more than just online advertisements. It's hard to believe that a $2.5 million advertisement during the Super Bowl is profitable, but I trust that the companies that buy these spots have done their research and it is actually profitable. Overall Anheuser-Busch spent $850 million on advertisements in 2005. While not all of that is advertising beer (they have a few amusement parks for example), let's say that half of it was on beer and they make a profit of 50 cents per bottle/can or equivalent. That means their advertisements would have to increase sales by 850 million bottles of beer in order to make a profit. This is of course greatly simplified, but it is a good exercise to show how susceptible the population is to advertisements.
This is EXACTLY how they are profitable. Multiply almost never by a ton of ad views and you've got yourself a profitable business. The exact same thing is true for spam advertisements -- except that it's a lot closer to never but it also gets many orders of magnitude more "hits" than a traditional website. The biggest goal in advertising today is to make sure that the advertisements are relevant to the people who view the advertisements, which is why Google especially has done well in the advertising marketplace. Additionally, many advertising agreements today only exchange money when a click-through (or even a sale) has occurred, as opposed to the older practice of charging per impression.
When I was in my teens a friend and I started up a game review website. While it only lasted a few months before it became too much to handle (and we also had gotten a little bored of it), we were getting between a 0.5 and 2% click-through rate depending upon our ad supplier.
This form of advertising on Facebook (flyers) is just one of the many ways to advertise on the site, and the vast majority of these ads are placed by students, student groups, or local businesses. For my networks there are rarely more than 6-7 of these ads up at any given time, so most visitors to the site (who will likely look at 10-20 pages per visit) will see all of the flyers available at a particular time.
It's the other advertisements (sponsored groups, banners at the bottom of the pages, etc.) where Facebook really brings in the dough, and also where the Microsoft ad deal took place.
I know several groups who have put up flyers on Facebook and for their purposes it was by far the most cost efficient solution to advertising, even when they were in a rotation with many other flyers. The other point I should make about the flyers is that they are often for events, so word of mouth will often spread the information to the people who might have missed that particular flyer. If I see a flyer for free ice cream at a particular event, I'll likely let my friends know about it as well.
When you see non-local advertisements in the flyer box it usually is the result of a separate deal directly with Facebook that is not subject to the flyer agreement.